


> FORGIVE YOURSELF

by Elendraug



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Homestuck Shipping World Cup 2013, M/M, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-24 02:33:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6138343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>JADE: somehow he understood the only way was to conceive of a third option<br/>JADE: an idea beyond the simple binary set of outcomes before him</p>
            </blockquote>





	> FORGIVE YOURSELF

**Author's Note:**

  * For [t34lbloods (perculious)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/gifts), [Puppeteer (Cendree)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cendree/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Coming-of-Age Shit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/967414) by [Puppeteer (Cendree)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cendree/pseuds/Puppeteer). 



> Thank you to perculious for giving me permission to write this unofficial third option. I hope you guys like it!

It’s been what, a minute? and he’s already giving you the same deadpan stare you aim at others when you’re bored and unimpressed. You wonder if he’d direct you to an autoresponder, in real life, if he had the opportunity. Now that you’ve thought it, you’re confident he’s making the same snide remark to himself in his head.

You watch him rock on his heels, in those dumb green slippers, with his hands shoved in his pockets like he’s at a goddamn bus stop, flooded for four centuries. You’ve never ridden a bus, and neither has he; you know he’s faking the movements from watching old-ass footage of actors who were executed on antediluvian Earth. You’ve never had any reason to intuitively know the casual, fluid fidgeting of an average, socialized person. During the years you spent waiting, you were either in constant motion on the roof or utter stillness at your desk or in the shower, busying yourself in your dreams while fucking nothing occurred in the wreckage you called home.

You think of the first law of motion, and of the external forces that took their damn time to act upon you. You think about your splinter self’s impatience and wonder if you can truly blame him.

“Hey. Wake the fuck up.”

He snaps his fingers at you; bile surges to the back of your throat. The worst of it is knowing that if you were in his place, you’d feel the same irritation. Isn’t that always the case? Isn’t that how it was for the self you trapped in your glasses, until he got dumped into a kernelsprite with a quivering horse fetishist? Not that you’ve got much room to judge on that, either.

You realize too late that he said something else and you didn’t catch it. “No, what?” you sputter.

He scoffs. “I asked if you were jacking off on Derse.”

You narrow your eyes, exposed without your shades to obscure your expression. “What would I be doing on Derse?”

“It’s a joke, you fuck.”

“I know it’s a joke. That was a joke, too.” It’s just like bickering with your autoresponder, but worse. You can’t put this Dirk into standby.

“That wasn’t a joke, jackass. That was fucking nothing.” He tosses his head back and his hair stays perfectly in place, for all the alchemized product you soak yourself in. God. “Your friends might give you a pass on that, but I won’t. I know your shit.”

He lowers his head and glares at you over the top of the shades. You’re waiting for a lens flare to catch the edge of the triangles, like you’re both in some bullshit syndicated FUNimation nightmare and something essential has been lost in translation.

“Well?” he asks. “You gonna make a decision, or doom us to a stalemate?”

“Don’t you have anything better to do than chase yourself in circles?” you counter, and you know it’s lame. You’re striking out consistently.

“A stalemate’s on a grid, shitstain.” He laughs. “Watch out for the sharp corners.”

Okay, so he’s striking out, too.

“What the fuck am I even supposed to be choosing?” you ask, more to yourself than to… well, yourself. “How is this any different than every other fucking time I’ve gone through these theatrics with myself?”

He snorts. “You’re such a genius. You tell me.”

You clench your fists again, harder than before, enough that your dirt-caked nails are digging into the injured spot on your hand from last week. It was deep enough that you know it’ll scar, deep enough that it’s still tender.

If he won’t approach you, you’ll have to move to meet him where he stands. Some compromise. Then again, maybe it’s up to you to put forth all the effort, this time. That’s the damn challenge.

Other Dirk grins as you step forward. “You’re pissed off now? What are you going to do, hit me?”

“No,” you tell him, and with your fists aching to go, it takes everything in you to keep your hands still at your sides.

“Typical. So much for being a stone cold motherfucker who betrays no emotion, right? That façade has never fooled anyone, and we both know it.”

“It’s not like I thought it would work.” You close your eyes and take a deep breath. You’ve got this. You’ve got more self-control than this.

“Didn’t you? Or were your last four years on the internet not proof enough?” He taps his shades, and from their sudden glow you can tell he’s pulling up text. “I can refresh your memory, if you’ve forgotten. Got some choice soundbites, here.”

You take another step toward him.

It’s uncanny, or maybe not. He’s not a facsimile of you. He _is_ you. You’re standing outside, looking in upon the same face you’ve stared at in your foggy bathroom mirror. He’s got the same acne on his nose that you wouldn’t stop fiddling with yesterday. He’s got the same scar on the outer corner of his left eye, from when you were little, on the day you narrowly avoided blinding yourself. You’d tripped and hit the corner of your plywood desk, and no one was around to catch you, nor comfort you through your crying. His lips are chewed with worry, same as yours, chapped and drier for the effort you put into anxiously licking them.

“What’s your plan, ‘Prince’?” He crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head, chuckling. It’s a fucking anime trope. You can hardly believe it, but you’re not honestly surprised, either. You _would_ stoop to that level. “You could’ve taken a stab at me by now, if you were serious. For all you aspire to embody Machiavellian extremes, you’re slacking.”

You breathe in, close your eyes, and breathe out. He continues taunting you.

“You’ve memorized that shit. I know you have. _Being disarmed makes you despised_ , asshole. A _Prince_ studies the art of war. Or are you finally ready to cut the crap and trash both texts?”

“It’s not a fucking how-to manual. Neither of them are.” You struggle to keep from raising your voice. “You can’t get a GameFAQs tutorial for life.”

Through all this, you’ve kept your eyes closed. If you only hear his voice, it’s easier to imagine this as the sort of conversation you play out in your head every goddamn day. But then, those conversations never go anywhere productive.

You open your eyes.

“Isn’t that what you want?” He drums his fingers on his bicep. “You keep asking me to give you instructions. That’s what you came down here for, wasn’t it? You want someone to hold your hand and lead you around.”

You shake your head. “No.”

“Yes. Duh. Just like you’ve secretly wanted since you were a kid.” He lifts his arms and does _jazz hands_ at you. Seriously? “You can lie to your friends all you want. I know better.”

You rub your thumbs over the side of your index fingers, your hands still clenched. You focus on the small movements and keep them steady, like circling the face of a clock.

“You may as well drop the posturing,” he continues. “There’s nothing you can hide from me. Not that you aren’t transparent as all get out to everybody else. Even the consorts could see through your shit, if they weren’t all fucking dead.”

“Is this what we’re going to do?” you ask. “I’m going to just eat myself alive. I’m eating my own tail.”

“Wrong.” He looks at you down the bridge of his nose, his head inclined slightly backwards, in a display that would make an RPG villain cringe in secondhand embarrassment. “You’re the snake that’s shoving his head up his own ass for eternity.”

You step forward again. He stands up straight and folds his arms back across his chest, spreads his stance and locks his knees. He’s a fucking brick wall you’re determined to talk to.

“You’re wasting everyone’s time,” he sneers. “You’re lucky you’ve been given this much, dude. You’re late enough as it is. Everybody else got their shit together a long time ago. If Roxy can get sober, what the fuck is your excuse?”

Despite the shades on his face, you can still make out the exhaustion on his features. The dark circles beneath his eyes. The faint sunburn scars that lie in sharp angles across his skin. The way his cheeks are too gaunt from a lifetime spent ricocheting between sugar highs, sugar crashes, and starvation rations of fish and gulls you still feel guilty for gutting. 

Guilt has come to define your life.

You’ve told yourself for years that you’ve done everything to take care of yourself, to survive against all odds; a lighthouse lit by LEDs and LCDs in the isolation of the global ocean. You kept yourself afloat, you think, and you cringe at your own phrasing. 

The question stands. Did you care for yourself, or just go through the motions?

“Can’t we work this out?” you ask.

“What, like you can just roll diplomacy and be absolved of lifelong self-loathing? That’s your fucking problem. You think you can just outmaneuver everything. Standard rules and regulations don’t goddamn apply to you. You want a FASTPASS through your own character development, like if you harass enough park employees for attention you can turn your actual life into a fucking Disney movie.”

You start to deny it, but then you remember that you literally asked Yaldabaoth to let you skip the boring cutscenes and get on with the campaign. Christ. You’ve got yourself pegged to a T, which… Obviously.

Despite his aggression, you get even closer. There are red marks on the bridge of his nose where his shades have been digging into his skin. There’s a blackhead on his right nostril. He rolls his eyes at you.

“What is your fucking angle, here? Do you think if you just stand there like a fucking jackass you’ll eventually wear me down? Fuck off!” 

He shoves you hard, his hands flat against your chest, on either side of the godawful gaudy heart symbol on your god tier attire. You stumble backwards but quickly regain your footing. You didn’t spend years with robots kicking your ass on your rooftop for nothing.

You know he’s trying to get your goat. This is the same hyperviolent, excessive shit you’d pull if you were overcompensating for your own self-doubt. Yaldabaoth has shown you for what you are: your own antagonist.

“Stop,” you tell him.

He shoves you again, his hands centered at the symbol. You think of the second law of motion, and according to your own mental gymnastics and rationalization, the increased force matches the rate of change. You convince yourself you’re on the right path.

“Fuck yourself!” he shouts. “And you could’ve, if you weren’t so fucking stagnant with your own self-reflection shit!”

“Stop it,” you repeat. You keep your voice calm even though your hands are shaking, in fists at your sides.

“Some fucking spy you are,” he snaps. “You’ve got an eye on everybody else’s private business, but what the fuck do you claim to know about yourself? You think you’ve got yourself figured out, and you can disregard any extra effort?” He lifts a hand to his throat. “Oh, wait. Except you’re counting on dying permanently before any of it matters. Isn’t that right?”

You shake your head. He shakes his like a bobblehead and makes obnoxious sound effects, mocking you.

“Don’t pretend I’m saying shit you haven’t said to yourself in your own mind a thousand times before.” He takes a step towards you, this time. You stay where you are. “Don’t act like you don’t constantly think about how that _microwave_ smelled.”

“I did what I had to,” you tell him. 

“But it was so easy, wasn’t it? Too easy. Most people would at least hesitate before decapitating themselves. But not us!” He draws his finger across his neck. “Off with his head! Check it out. Now you can match Jane’s _Alice in Wonderland_ allegory.”

You swallow hard. Your face feels hot. “Please stop.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna. This is the last stop on the Shitty Splinter Brain Ghost Train. This is the logical culmination of your entire worthless life. This is everything you’ve told yourself, bundled up in a convenient package to regurgitate exposition for you.”

“Stop.”

“You’ve already died twice. Third time’s the charm. You know it’d be Just.”

“Stop it.” You clench your teeth.

“I’m right here. Fucking kill yourself.”

You meet his eyes, unwavering, even though you’re ready to grind your molars apart. You don’t say anything; you just stare back. His eyebrows are narrowed, the same brows you’ve always thought were too bushy. When he speaks again, he’s screaming in your face.

“ _Do it_ , faggot!”

You screw your eyes shut and throw your arms around him. He pushes you away, immediately.

“Fucking Christ, there’s your fucking Disney Channel shit again. You think you’re gonna literally embrace yourself? Like it’s that easy?” He spits at your face, and you raise your hand to block it. It lands on your glove, and it’s disgusting. 

“I don’t think it’s easy,” you say, but it sounds fucking weak, even to you.

“You’ve hated yourself the entire time you’ve been alive, and you think this token symbolic bullshit is going to impress Snake-God-Mufasa? _Remember who you are_ , Dirk! You’re a fucking failure.”

“Why are you doing this?” You wipe the spit onto your leg, but it seeps into the tights. Gross. 

“What, the sick pop culture burns? Pff.” He points at your shirt, accusatory. “You don’t even want to be a Heart player, and now you think you can snap your fingers and become goddamn Ma-Ti. Let’s just hug it out for Captain Planet, in a fucking cartoon universe where nothing bad is ever permanent. Minihoof can ride around on your shoulder instead of that monkey, which would be an improvement, since you’re ready to bail on her if you shuffle off the mortal coil.”

Your chest is tight with guilt and regret. “I didn’t—”

“Then we can all sing Kumbaya, and instead of holding hands we can have a big circlejerk of self-love. Kumbaya bukakke. Is that your fucking plan?”

You stare into his eyes, and he’s so angry it’s nauseating. You feel so young and so old.

You hate hating him.

“Stop it,” you beg, your voice low, non-threatening. “Just stop.”

“You know what’s fucking funny?” His tone is suddenly conversational, like he hasn’t just spent this time berating you. “I know you’ve been making these cute Isaac Newton jokes to yourself, like you’ve got this all figured out. Like everything has some hidden symbolism that you’re gonna piece together, because you’re so much smarter than everybody else who’s ever lived. Because _you_ have the internet.”

The nausea gets worse. Everything you’ve been thinking has been broadcast to him, just like to your denizen. You’re mortified.

“You know the third law, don’t you?” He keeps talking. You’re grinding your teeth again. “Equal and opposite forces, you sad sack of shit. Even if you stop hating me, it doesn’t stop me from hating you.”

Even Hal was never like this. Your routine self-flagellation has never been this vicious, because it’s never been spoken aloud before now. You refuse to cry.

“You’re gonna hate a hole through paradox space itself long before you let this shit go,” he continues. “Straight through to a new reality, with new splinters of you, fragmented and fresh for the hating.”

There’s a low hum, so deep you almost can’t hear it. You liken it to a massive server room, with a thousand machines processing shit in unison. Right now, you wish more than ever that you were a machine, a fucking tin can with no emotions. It’d be simpler to be rid of it all.

“You’re forgetting something,” you point out. “If I’m a force, and you’re an opposing force, then…”

“So fucking help me if this is a ‘who was phone’ joke.”

You ignore his comment. “Self-actualization, humanism, all that shit is the third force. That was what Maslow called it. So the physics jokes are on point. That’s what’s gonna make the difference in this godawful tug of war.”

“And that’s the shit you wanted to fast-forward through. You still proud of your non-statement, there?”

“I don’t know.” You drag the back of your hand across your eyes. You forgot about the spit. Ugh.

“There’s no undo button for sixteen years of suicidal self-hatred, fucktard.”

“There’s not,” you agree. “But I can stop it from now on.”

He crosses his arms over his chest, yet again. You wonder if this is something you should be more cognizant of when you’re with the others, if it’s this much of a reflexive habit. It makes you look guarded and closed-off, and you don’t like it.

You bring your arms around him and rest your chin on his shoulder. You can feel the edge of his shades poking into your hair.

“Are you that desperate for physical contact?”

“Yes,” you admit. “Aren’t you?”

He goes quiet. His elbows are pressed into your ribcage. It’s not the most pleasant hug you’ve ever been in—of which there have been few, to begin with—but it’s a relief enough that he’s stopped his efforts to hurt you.

“I’m so sorry,” you tell him. “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to us.”

It sounds empty, and you aren’t entirely feeling it, but you think you should still try. You rub at his back, awkwardly, still unsure of how to deal with anyone being in your physical space. You’re very ready to skip past all that adjustment, too, but you know it’ll take time.

Eventually he unfolds his arms and wraps them back around you. You feel like you don’t deserve it, just like you convinced yourself you didn’t deserve anything other than pallets of Doritos and soda, and that for losing a fight, you deserved to lie bleeding in the sun, robo-beaten on top of your apartment.

You don’t say anything for a while. You don’t need to, if he can read your thoughts. He knows, because you know, and he’s always known. After a few minutes you both decide to sit down, knees in the dirt, holding onto one another. It’s not until he starts running his hands through your hair that you start crying.

You nearly collapse in grief, years of abandonment and anguish all suddenly given catharsis. You let yourself rest against his chest, sprawled and ungraceful, nothing like the self-styled ninja persona you’ve crafted, some hypothetical dude who’s much cooler than you. He lets you cry, lets you sob and shake in his arms, lets you get snot and saline on his god tier garments, all the while combing his fingers through the stiff spikes of your hair, working out the spray and gel and whatever the fuck else as he goes.

He smells like you do when you need a shower, which is constantly because Texas is fucking hot. On top of that, you’ve been running around LOTAK like it’s a platformer, and hey, isn’t it? His sweat is identical to yours, and that’s weird, but after a life of solitude you’re still getting used to how other people smell. Your brother’s clothing had lost all trace of anything, by the time you landed in the ocean. Years of puppet cosleeping led to Lil Cal smelling exactly like you, exactly like home. Your own presence has been your sole source of comfort and conflict, for as long as you’ve been conscious.

After a while, after you’ve calmed down, you sit up enough to look at him again. You make an active effort to admire your own face: your cheekbones, your eyes, the self-conscious half-smirk thing you do as a defense mechanism because you’ve convinced yourself it looks cool, the arch of your eyebrows above your shades. You lift your hand to Other Dirk’s face and use your thumb to brush off the dirt that’s smudged on his left cheek. He looks so fucking tired, and _god_ , do you feel it.

You bring his right hand up to your mouth and uncurl his fingers enough to kiss the faintly scabbed mark from your katana, right at the center of his palm, like you’re showing respect to the fucking stigmata or some shit. He smiles at you for that one. It doesn’t make it _not_ a lame thing to think, but maybe you don’t need to get so hung up about how cool your internal monologue is or isn’t at any given moment.

You don’t say anything, until you need to. There’s power in speaking aloud, and you’ve always thought that shit was fucking dumb as hell, but if there was ever a time to go through some self-affirmation, you think this is probably it. 

“I will be kind to myself.” It sounds so fake. You speak again, with a stronger force of conviction. “Even when it’s hard. Even when I fuck up.” 

Other Dirk beams at you and it’s fucking radiant. You don’t know if you’ve ever seen yourself look so happy, but that’s a discouraging thought so you keep going. “Especially when I don’t think I deserve it.”

You get onto your knees, and lift yourself up until you’ve raised enough to lean towards him and kiss his temple. You have to maneuver past his shades, and you’re gonna lose your balance if you keep it up too long, but you do it. You get the scent of styling product right up your nose, but you don’t care.

“I deserve better than this.”

You make no move to grab for his shades. You know they’re a defense mechanism, and at this point, you think you’re done with giving your shades a hard time, too.

He stands up and offers his hand to you. You take it, and as soon as you’re on your feet he embraces you tightly, in the sort of strong, all-encompassing hug you think your bro may have given you if he hadn’t died centuries ago. He stands on his toes to kiss the top of your head—you’re the same height, naturally—and holds your hands in his own for a long moment.

“I love myself,” he tells you, and you bark out a startled laugh. He does that self-conscious smirk and shrugs. “Say it until we believe it.”

You realize he’s about to leave you. The atmosphere of the room has changed; there’s a low hum coming back, the infinite servers of whatever pocket of paradox space has produced the so-called god of monsters.

He lets go of your hands, one at a time, until his fingertips slip away from yours and he’s walking back into the flashbulb space he came from.

“You’ll be okay,” he says, and he’s smiling so much that you actually do feel okay.

A brightness fills the room, like Texas sun on the sea. You take a deep breath.

In an instant, your brain overflows with a deluge of awareness. You can feel yourself throughout existence. Every one of your selves, in every instance, with every confrontation and reconciliation, every death and deified rebirth, through eyes gone white with full sclera, infinite iterations of Sburb echoing back from the furthest reaches of extradersite space, splintered as fractals, out to the edge. You feel attuned to the limit of a circle, mapping its area across the universe, down to the last quark, charged red, blue, and green. You feel attuned to _antiblue_.

You cycle through myriad emotions and sensory data in rapid succession: Freon and steel, nourished with adrenaline and fear; an electric pressure headache in a mansion; a desolate landscape and Jane’s towering height; the skies above Hellmurder Island and metal fingers smacking Jake’s glasses off his face; the throbbing, fading pain of a gushing jugular on Roxy’s floor; floating alongside the debris of denizens and fizzling out; Cal’s waterlogged body and sudden shocking cold; acute acrylic claustrophobia; rippling, unbridled joy. Upheaval and unending energy summoned from your gut, expelled upon the masses. A flattened absence, defined around its edges, like playing minesweeper or seeking a black hole, and an abundance of misshapen stallions.

There’s a recurring theme through every version of yourself, and you shiver with the crushing realization that it’s fear. Fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of death, fear of rejection, fear of the collapse of what is known and unknown. You try to resolve it, but before you can process the information you’ve been given, the moment has passed into a new breaking wave of insight.

You’re awake, and you always have been, save for a single nap you took in Cal’s lap in the moments just past your birth, just prior to being snapped into consciousness by the crash of the ocean. You’re awake, and you imagine your brain overclocking itself to count the spots of circuitous cartography, shattered and slivered through darkness. You’re awake, and you can feel yourself as Yaldabaoth described: a creator, but not a benefactor, he says. _He_ may not watch over, but you have eyes everywhere, beneviolence or not: a watchman at the center of the universe, seated at the paradoxical _axis mundi_ , with infinite heuristic depth and limitless surveillance of the game’s imprisoned players; a watchmaker with flawless vision, the very fabric of space-time fine-tuned through dual channels of digital precision, interwoven as a double ouroboros that somehow, somewhen, you’ve strung together across two glitched entities of extracted genetic sequencing, balanced on the edge of a sword.

You’re awake, and you can see yourself tearing yourself apart and sealing yourself away.

The crackling noises of a campfire reach your ears before your eyes can adjust to the piercing-white flare. 

“Do you now know what it is you must do, Prince?”

Yaldabaoth is before you, again, speaking in below-bass registers you shouldn’t be able to hear. But then, you can’t justify how you know the things you now know. You feel fucking enlightened, and hey. You’re already here, dressed for the part.

You’re trembling, but some aspect of yourself is at peace. You stand before him, no longer resentful, and you carefully consider his question. Wisely, you stop yourself from answering with flippant bullshit, or anything arrogant.

At long last, you shake your head. 

“Not quite, but I’ll figure it out.”


End file.
